Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Man and His Endless Jnani Quest

No, that's not just a strained pun. Look it up: knowledge, specifically, knowledge that is "inseparable from the total experience of reality, especially a total reality or supreme being." (A jnani is on a quest for jnana.)

You see, occasionally English lacks the mot juste -- mot juste being another -- to describe certain things, including spiritual realities. And even if we did have such a word, it would probably be saturated by now, which is where our sacred wordplay, or punnishantics, come in, so as to remystify the language. In short, it helps us keep the good news new and our nous to the groundstone.

According to Purcell, there is a universal Quest "that summons all true human beings to the heart of the human mystery." Are "quest" and "question" etymologically related? I don't know, but Purcell says that we are not the answers, nor is "the source of the summons even... clear to us." In short, there is no self-sufficient explanation for the mystery of man and his wonderlust about the Mystery.

To back up a bit, if you don't recognize that man -- i.e., your existence -- is a mystery, then you are dismissed. You are way beyond -- or before -- my capacity to help you aggravate the mystery or shed any further obscurity on matters.

In a letter, Dostoyevsky wrote that "Man is a mystery. One must solve it.... I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man" (in Purcell).

Isn't that a bit t-t-tautologous? Man is a mystery, but the pursuit of this mystery is somehow intrinsic to what it means to be a man. You're a mystery, Mister O! And the worst thing you can do is perform a mysterectomy on yourself. Rather, leave it to the experts: the tenured.

Now, you might suppose that a standard autobiography is a kind of transparent plunge into the mystery, but that approach usually leads nowhere if it fails to link up with the Source. In other words, the individual self is literally a kind of inexhaustible mystery, but this "inexhaustibility" provides a clue to the Big Mystery, since man is a kind of "finite infinitude" which mirrors the infinite infinitude of O.

Therefore, if you imagine that your bullshit will ever run dry, you're only fooling yourself. You'll never find God that way, because you're already in the ocean searching for water.

Now that it is understood that man is embedded in a cosmic drama extending back no less than 13.85 billion years -- that History is much longer than anyone ever supposed -- it is frankly impossible to write a comprehensive autobiography without taking into consideration, say, the big bang, the evolution of life, and the emergence of human consciousness; and on a more micro level, one's prelinguistic development (before the age of five), which is itself a vast undiscovered country, an infinite ground in its own way.

By which I mean that if we are deprived of certain ground-floor experiences during this sensitive period, our quest for the Ground will be compromised later in life. The psychoanalyst Michael Balint wrote of the "basic fault" (as in "fault line"), which can even be seen as one way in which man perpetuates his ancestral Fall from generation to generation. A person haunted by the Basic Fault often spends his life in pursuit of what might be called "dark mysteries," or thrilling perversions and secret compulsions of various kinds.

Pardon the abrupt transition, but I am glad to see another writer tackling the "discontinuity problem" of human beings. In fact, Purcell makes a useful distinction between the fact of evolution and the ideology of "evolutionism," which is analogous to the critical distinction between science and scientism, of which every educated person should be aware.

The dogma of evolutionism maintains that there is no ontological distinction between man and animal, an absurd metaphysic that immediately runs aground for reasons Darwin himself intuited:

"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

The answer is no, of course not. That being the case, where is the line in nature at which point monkey convictions become reliable and trustworthy? The ideology answers -- and disproves -- itself if one is honest.

Recall that in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica, the individual chapters are so arranged as to be both discontinuous -- i.e., discrete and numbered, just like any other book -- but also continuous and flowing, apparently unlike any other book. This complementarity signifies a number of things, including the ontological discontinuity -- the evolutionary leap, which evolution supposedly cannot do -- of man.

Yes, we are aware of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, but that is merely another attempt at a natural explanation to "save the appearances" of what is clearly a transnatural phenomenon.

One of the themes that runs through From Big Bang to Big Mystery is that human beings "are both continuous with the evolutionary process and discontinuous with it." I for one know exactly what he means when he references Walker Percy's observation that there is "more difference between a human and an animal -- let's say an orangutan -- than between the animal and the planet Saturn."

Everything thus far has been introductory. Details will be filled in as we proceed down this mysterious rabbit hole.

People often pay too little attention to what their mental dissatisfactions mean.

I'm thinking of William. Is there anything more to the fact that he wants to keep his mind open? Clearly, he likes to wait for a satisfactory answer to his questions. That is, he's waiting for the answers that constantly transcend him. And yet he never bothers to wonder why this is the case, or what this means.

Could it be that he is structurally geared toward the infinite, which alone constitutes the satisfactory answer to his mental demands?

Or is he, like an unreflective ape, just content to eat bananas as he goes along?

And participate in Saturnalia, of course. You can't be an ape and not strut around, take instinctual pleasure in grooming, and gibber with other apes about females and heteronormative capitalist oppressor silverbacks.

Sorry, Magister is another name for Verdiales. I created another blog, didn't want to post there as Verdiales, created another nic, and now I don't have time to investigate how to turn it back. Not trying to sock puppet!

Thanks for the clarification - I knew "Magister" had to be someone we knew, but didn't know who :)

I have to disagree with you a bit, though: I don't think William is waiting for a satisfactory answer, because there is no answer that can satisfy him for most of his questions. To the extent that he "participates" here, it seems to be an effort to prove his own superiority - a mental version of the races he runs. Of course, since he sets the rules for his own questions, he guarantees that he always "wins," regardless of the answers.

As further evidence, I'd submit his history with other blogs such as Protein Wisdom (just do a search there for "William Yelverton"). As I understand it, he was once so obnoxious at another place (though of course, this is something I've heard through the grapevine, so take with a grain of salt) that the blog owner folded. In other words, one time he really "won."

There may be some deeper reason, unacknowledged by his conscious mind, which keeps sending him back here, but if so his behavior demonstrates that he's fighting that reason with every ounce of his being. Heaven forbid he should "lose," and find that everything he thought he knew was wrong...

"Pardon the abrupt transition, but I am glad to see another writer tackling the "discontinuity problem" of human beings. In fact, Purcell makes a useful distinction between the fact of evolution and the ideology of "evolutionism," which is analogous to the critical distinction between science and scientism, of which every educated person should be aware."

Indeed. Ol' Zeno proved himself a piker by devoting his smarts to proving how impossible it is to prove that an arrow actually moves during its flight from the bow to the target, or to how impossible it is for Achilles to catch up with, and pass, a turtle. Of course, if he, and his proregressive dependents, wanted a real challenge, they'd ask instead how it's possible for a person to move from the position of asking such questions, to the position of understanding that to persist in such 'reasoning' is a flight away from reality, not towards it, IOW: unintelligent.

But nooo, they not only avoid the real questions, they avoid the proper way to ask the proper questions; by claiming that you can't possibly move from one point to another in a path, they avoid the reality of the path, let alone how to advance beyond their own position on that path.

Instead, they (cough*willian*cough) jabber at us with their proofs that a person doesn't actually change positions or move along a path, and even asserts that the path is no more real than the possibility that an arrow could possibly be proven to move along it in any way, shape or form at all.

Ever notice that they never state their conclusions while standing in the path of the arrow in flight?

Well, you all have more experience with William than I do. Sorry about that! What I've read of him reminds me of a very young version of my own brother, who is as uninterested in God as they come. This pains me, so I keep trying to remain open to grounds for hope.

Is the glass of water half-full, or half-empty? My answer is, "it's always full: of air, and water."

I was thinking that memories and pathways built before age five are stored differently -- non-linguistically -- which is why children tend to have trouble remembering specifics prior to about that age.

Absolutely -- they are stored in the right brain, which develops ahead of the left, the latter of which contains the "language center." This explains, for example, how a mysterious mood can be triggered by some outward situation. The mood is in the right brain and "outside" language, although one might also say that man has developed a whole host of means with which to express right brain concerns, religious ritual being one of them. Music is another way -- speaking of which, I find the CD by Morricone in the sidebar to be incredibly evocative of the "unthought known." He's gotta be the greatest film composer ever.

i owned the dvd of THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY years before watching it recently; boy that morricone [fellow scorp, bob!] music sure is haunting and unique---and while the lands depicted look like a few miles outa town from here, I didnt place that 2note whistle-theme as a coyote imitation til someone pointed it out!

well on the subject of fillim scores, best variety, a special award goes to Jack Nitzsche for "Performance""The only movie I have ever done where nobody interfered, nobody," Jack told me in a 1998 interview. "To this day, I'll be in a restaurant, or walking down the street, or leaving a screening on a lot somewhere like at Paramount, and someone will yell out 'Performance'. Recently, Billy Friedkin saw me walking and across the street yelled 'Performance'. The greatest use of music in a motion picture ever".

What About Bob?

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!

Goround ZerO:

The Cosmic Area Rug:

The empty center is Beyond-Being. The circles are dimensions of Being. Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones.

Only Error is Transmitted:

Buck Mulligan, Official Mascot

Official Sponsor of the Kosmic Kit Scouts, Laniakea Supercluster Chapter

Fuck You: War

Late last night, in search of light, I watched a ball of fire streak across the midnight sky. I watched it glow, then grow, then shrink, then sink into the silhouette of morning. As I watched it die, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot in common with that light.’ That’s right. I’m alive with the fire of my life, which streaks across my span of time and is seen by those who lift their eyes in search of light to help them though the long, dark night. --Nilsson

We see that yesterday is our birthday, today is our life, and tomorrow we are gone. So we have just one day to learn all we need to know, and that day is today. --Petey